With New Afghan Vote, Path to Stability Is Unclear

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan with Senator John Kerry at a news conference in Kabul on Tuesday.Credit
Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

This article is bySabrina Tavernise, Mark Landler and Helene Cooper.

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai’s concession of the need for a runoff election in Afghanistan appears to have prevented his country from slipping into paralysis, but has created a new landscape of risks and uncertainty.

Mr. Karzai’s concession was a critical first step toward creating a credible Afghan government, coming after heavy pressure from European and American officials, including veiled threats that his actions could affect pending decisions about troops levels, according to one American official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter.

But diplomats immediately questioned whether a new vote could be arranged before the announced date of Nov. 7, and whether a second round of balloting would have more security or less fraud than the first, in which nearly a quarter of ballots were thrown out by international auditors. “There are huge constraints to delivering in the second round,” said one Western official. “Can you deliver a result that is any different from the one we’ve already got?”

The host of uncertainties left open the prospect of what administration officials and their Western allies expect will be three weeks of ferocious horse-trading as Mr. Karzai and his principal challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, decide whether they can strike a deal to actually avert a runoff, which would carry enormous political risks for both of them, as well as strategic ones for the United States and its allies.

Diplomats said the efforts to get the two men to join forces would now intensify. Mr. Abdullah has hinted he would be open to negotiate, but Mr. Karzai, at a news conference here on Tuesday, seemed to rule it out.

“The coalition has no legitimacy and is not possible,” he said, standing alongside Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who negotiated with Mr. Karzai for nearly 20 hours over 5 days to accept the results.

Yet officials said that if there was a deal it would likely involve Mr. Abdullah conceding to Mr. Karzai, in return for a major role in overhauling Afghanistan’s Constitution to give the president less power.

Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission formally certified the vote Tuesday, and said Mr. Karzai had received 49.7 percent of the votes, higher than a foreign-led panel of experts conducting the audit had found, but still below the over 50 percent required to avoid a runoff.

Mr. Karzai seemed to dismiss any fraud, saying of the disqualified votes: “The voters are not to blame. Why their votes were disrespected, should be thoroughly investigated. But it is not the right time to discuss this.”

While some see a deal between Mr. Karzai and Mr. Abdullah as a way to create a credible Afghan government with broader popular support, many in the Obama administration express concerns that it would only make the running of Afghanistan more chaotic, given the enmities between the two.

After Mr. Karzai’s complaints of foreign interference, the administration is also determined not to appear to meddle.

“We feel very strongly about this,” said one of President Obama’s closest foreign policy advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We had a big stake in making sure we had a legitimate election. But this is up to the Afghans.”

As it became clear that international auditors would invalidate enough votes to push Mr. Karzai below the threshold for a runoff, the American efforts to convince the president that he had not won the election outright were extraordinary.

In one personal moment during a weekend of long dinners and walks in the garden of the sprawling, heavily fortified presidential palace in Kabul, Senator Kerry recounted his experience in the 2004 presidential election, including the lingering questions about ballots cast in Ohio that helped decide the vote against him.

“I told him, ‘sometimes there are tough things,’ ” Mr. Kerry said in an interview on Tuesday.

A senior administration official described the international pressure on Mr. Karzai as a “full court press” that also included not-so-subtle threats delivered by telephone to Mr. Karzai’s defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak.

Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates both called General Wardak to press him to persuade Mr. Karzai to concede, a senior administration official said.

“Wardak wants more American troops,” said this official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing private conversations. “They both told Wardak that this would affect the decision-making process on the troops.”

At times Obama administration officials seemed at odds over how to deal with Mr. Karzai’s recalcitrance. On Sunday, the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said Mr. Obama would not make a decision on troops until the political uncertainty in Afghanistan had lifted. On Tuesday, Mr. Gates said the United States could not wait for that.

Sensing last week that a crisis was brewing in Kabul and would coincide with a visit there by Mr. Kerry, Mrs. Clinton dispatched Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the senator’s Georgetown townhouse to brief him about the situation and ask for his help.

On Friday evening, when Mr. Kerry was dining in Kabul with American troops, the United States ambassador, Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, warned him that Mr. Karzai was threatening to denounce the election audit.

Alarmed that this would plunge Afghanistan into paralysis, General Eikenberry asked Mr. Kerry to go to the palace that night. By Senator Kerry’s account, what followed were a series of meetings over the next four days.

“We worked through the risks, we worked through the stakes,” Mr. Kerry said by phone from Dubai, on his way back to Washington. “He was patient, he was searching for answers.”

Mrs. Clinton also spoke to Mr. Karzai for 40 minutes on Friday, during which he complained he could never be a legitimate leader if the ballots of 1.3 million of his Pashtun supporters were disqualified. Mrs. Clinton, no stranger to bitter disappointment at the polls, told him she sympathized with his plight, according to officials with knowledge of the conversation.

But she argued that if Mr. Karzai ran in a runoff and prevailed, which she and other American officials believe he would, that would be the surest way for him to claim legitimacy.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke with Mr. Karzai three times, European diplomats said, adding his voice to the pressure. “He made clear that Karzai just had to accept” the results of the international election commission, one diplomat said, or he “would no longer be a partner of the West.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 21, 2009, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Karzai Accepts Afghan Runoff, But Path to Stability Is Unclear. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe